Intelligent Text Summarization

Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium

With the proliferation of online textual resources, it has become very difficult to find information of interest. Improving access to online information includes finding relevant documents (information retrieval) and presenting only information that matches the user's interests (text summarization). In this symposium, we aim to discuss both the advantages of more classic, statistical sentence-extraction techniques for text summarization and the strengths of other (e.g., symbolic and rule-based) techniques. We will be looking for discussions on some fundamental questions: What is a summary? What is an abstract? How can one evaluate the quality of a summary? We will also devote time to new paradigms in summarization-multimodal and multilingual summarization, scalability, and user modeling.